


A Playbutton or This?

by Interruptedfern



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: M/M, Youtuber AU, fashion blogger damen, gamer laurent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-16 11:09:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7265698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Interruptedfern/pseuds/Interruptedfern
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Damen is a fashion blogger, Laurent is a gamer. They have tons of fans, clamoring for a collaboration. (Bonus story about Charls)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Real Story

I can hear the fandom declaring Laurent as a fashion vlogger, beauty guru type person, because he's got the face for it, and the holier-than-thou attitude that you might expect from a model, and to them I say what book series have you been reading. If anyone is going to be gently judging other people's clothes for a living, it's gonna be Damen.

 

Therefore, I declare Damen a beauty guru who focuses primarily on clothes (though if you don't think he has Things To Say on other stuff, you should watch search through his channel for a series he calls The War of Makeups). Everyone assumes that he is, at first glance, some online fitness instructor, or at a stretch _maybe_ a DIY person. Someone who wears a lot of flannel and films himself as he hikes around swinging axes impressively at trees.

 

Everyone is wrong, and Damen kind of really enjoys the double-take everyone always does when he introduces himself. Because, like, his _channel_ name is pretty recognizable. CaptiveDamnen (he is so proud of that channel name you have no idea) is a big deal in the community, it’s just the _person_ that no one is expecting.

 

Laurent would also totally be a gamer. Like, he doesn't look the type at all, but he is absolutely 100% the kind of person who would adore the competitive, strategic world of online gaming and he would kill as a cool, sarcastic commentator navigating his way flawlessly through level after level of the most complicated, mind-fucky games. Whenever he shows up to meet and greets he manages to leave without a hair out of place.

 

He still edits everything with surgical precision, his entire setup is always crystal clear and perfect.. He’s a competent video editor, because he'd never enter into a project without at the very least understanding every aspect of it, but he also probably hires a film major named Jord to help him shoot and edit so that it looks perfect.

 

While Laurent does excel at playing every single part himself, he also has a common costar by the name of Nicaise. No one quite knows _why_ , because while Nicaise is a good gamer and quite frankly stunning to look at, he’s probably the most evil person in the world in real life, and he makes absolutely no attempt to hide it by constantly getting Laurent killed. Fans have spent _years_  trying to figure out the puzzle that is Nicaise and Laurent’s relationship, ever since Nicaise appeared in one of the earliest videos as a tiny, angelic looking, extraordinarily bratty child of nine. He’s not related, Laurent has never made any mention of any sort of deal between them, and Nicaise was there from the beginning so he can’t possibly have been looking to ride on Laurent’s coattails, because that was long before Laurent, and indeed the YouTube platform, had any pull anywhere. 

 

Damen spends like half a live show the night after a big YouTube event trying to answer people's questions about what products Laurent must use to be able to mingle with literally a thousand fans and still look like he's ready for a professional photo shoot.

 

Damen, on the other hand, is very home-grown YouTube. Not that it's shittily done, not at all, but it doesn't have the slightly unrealistic veneer that Laurent has all over his videos. He shoots and edits himself ninety nine percent of the time.

 

 

Damen most often collaborates with a DIY YouTuber, Nikandros, who helps Damen out with the more crafty projects that require equipment that Damen doesn't really want to go out and buy, in exchange for Damen going through Nik's closet and finding him good date outfits while Nik stares bewilderedly at Damen's back and very clearly does not absorb a single tip Damen gives him. Their combined audiences apparently adore watching him quietly putting a pillow over his head and giving up in abject defeat while in the background Damen keeps up a light patter of information about how it's not his closet that's wrong, it's the way he's pairing his clothes.

 

Damen claims that he's an expert strategist, which is why he's able to work the magic that he does. He says that it's not so much an inborn knowledge of what colors suit each other as it is understanding the component parts of an outfit and how they all play together.

 

Damen says this at a YouTube event panel, where he and maybe fifteen other YouTubers with completely different channels have all been herded onto a stage to discuss the common links between them as members of the YouTube platform, rather than as individual creators. Nik is sitting beside him, and makes furious cutting off motions as Damen declares himself a strategist, to the amusement of the whole crowd, leaving Damen to let his sentence trail off in confusion as he looks left at his friend and doesn't notice the icy glare coming from his right from the probably rightfully proclaimed king of strategy himself, Laurent of the channel "PrinceVere."

 

He keeps on not noticing until Laurent leans into the microphone and says, "Expert strategist?" with enough polite poison in his voice to make the entire audience go OOOooooooooooooo as one.

 

Damen turns around, still so incredibly confused, and says, "Yes, I am a strategist," and then, looking rather derisively at Laurent's clothing choice, "You might not think of clothing as a winnable venture, but _I_ do."

 

The OOOOOOOooooooooooos get louder, and the rest of the panel leans back to exchange amused glances around the heads of the two in the middle, still duking it out with increasingly more sarcastic comments. People'd been wondering when Laurent Vere and Damen Akielos would finally meet, as it seemed strange that two YouTubers who had been on the platform around the same amount of time and achieved the same ridiculous amount of popularity hadn't met yet, particularly as they even lived in the same city. There were also more than a few bets placed on whether they would start tearing each other apart the instant that they met, or if they'd wait five minutes.

 

Nikandros won the pool, as it happened, both for where and for how long, though at the moment he was rather more concerned with giving Damen's shirt a sharp yank from behind the table to force his friend to remember that he was very much in public.

 

Laurent and Damen spent the rest of the panel, and the weekend, ignoring each other with such single-minded focus that it was immediately obvious to anyone who so much as walked into a room with the two of them.

____

The live show that turned into a Q&A about Laurent's hair products also marked the beginning of a massive movement between both of their fandoms to get them to film at least one collab. Their follower counts shot up at least a half million in the week that followed The Panel. The fans were insistent.

 

Laurent, in his monthly Q&As, said no. Damen, in his informal weekly liveshows, said no. Nicaise, without being asked for his opinion, said that "that boy" didn't _deserve_ to collaborate with Laurent, because he would obviously be such a poor gamer that they would have nothing to do. Nik, when questioned at length by his own fans, pointed out that Laurent was hardly likely to let Damen root around in _his_ closet, and quite frankly would probably burn anything that Damen actually suggested he liked. Then he put on his welding mask and took a blowtorch to an old metal bed frame.

 

Jord, when asked for his opinion, shrugged and said that he wasn't sure what their common ground was.

 

A full six months later, at another YouTube event, someone asked if Laurent had read any of the Lamen fic. At almost the exact same time, in a completely different room, Damen was asked the same question.

 

That marked the day of the first documented time both Damen and Laurent agreed on something. In this case, it was a highly offended judging-you face, followed by an incredulous, " _Lamen_?"

____

No one knew how the first collab actually happened. Neither of them were the sort of people who gave in gracefully to peer pressure, and the comments about it had actually dramatically decreased a year after the event. The fanfiction was still going strong, of course, but the really rabid requests only popped up about half of the time, rather than all of it.

 

A few fans, after doing some digging for a while, suspected that it had something to do with the return of Laurent's brother, Auguste, who had spent the last three years living abroad. Auguste, a casual travel vlogger who only reached modest levels of fame due to the occasional cameo by his far more popular little brother, was good friends with Nikandros, and there was a comic that got several thousand notes on Tumblr depicting Auguste and Nik tying Damen and Laurent to chairs and firmly instructing them to _work out their issues_ , and then leaving the room arm and arm and cackling.

 

They played a shopping simulator on Laurent's side channel, where he occasionally played requested games that were not particularly strategy based or requiring of more than a single video to finish, but were very fun. Nicaise appeared in significantly more of those sorts of videos, and in fact could be seen in the background during the middle of their game throwing popcorn at Damen's hair and then leaving reluctantly after getting a single raised eyebrow response from Laurent.

 

The video was a record breaking success for both of them, and the channel CaptivePrince was born. Once a month, like clockwork, they made a video that was usually something that didn't actually fit into either of their genres. Challenge videos, amateur DIY attempts, a string of three videos in which they played a game of monopoly on camera and slowly but surely lost their minds, all had the same sarcastic banter, and the same aggressively competitive undertones that their original meeting had had, even if all they were doing were answering a tag, but now each video also had startled laughter, and arguments that ended in agreements, and completely identical I'm-sorry-what-now responses to anyone else who entered into the video, accidentally or entirely on purpose.

____

 

Two years after the first CaptivePrince video, they both happened to be on the same panel again, at the same event where they first met. An innocent fan asked the panel as a whole how significant others and family members dealt with being closely associated to people who were famous on one platform, but also entirely anonymous on others. When the line of answers got to Laurent, he pointed out that his brother _was_ a YouTuber, so that was family taken care of, and then he glanced at Damen, sitting beside him, shrugged, and said, "And my husband is a YouTuber too, so that's easy."

 

The entire room went totally silent, as if no one could quite believe what he just said, and in that silence Damen had just enough time to grab the mic from Laurent and say, "Well, same, yeah, so that helps," before the screaming started.

 

Then the audience went _ballistic_ , and the panel had to be shut down thirty minutes early because there were people literally having hysterical breakdowns in the aisle.

 

Nikandros, on the other side of Damen, hissed, "Thank you," to both of them as they were ushered off the stage, before wandering away to track down Auguste, and Nicaise met them in the backstage area with the biggest grin Damen had ever seen on his face.

 

"They're _crying_ in there," he said cheerfully, before skipping away to watch on the monitors as security began the difficult task of clearing the room.

 

"Does that mean he finally approves of us?" Damen asked Laurent quietly as they were taken in a golf cart through the back ways to their hotel room in order to avoid the mess in the halls.

 

"I have no idea," Laurent said, beaming at him. "Isn't that great? I have _no clue_."

 

Damen grabbed his hand, and ran his thumb over the ring there as they exited the golf cart and walked into their room. "Can I finally do a closet video for you, now that we're out?"

 

Laurent shot him an entirely unconvincing glare and said, "We just came out of the closet, and now you want to go back in?"

 

Laughing, Damen fell backwards onto the bed and grinned up at him, and Laurent sighed. "Only if you agree to play a game with me."

 

Damen was up like a shot. "Agreed," he said, holding out his hand like they were in a business meeting.

Laurent took it, and then held it trapped. "A _real game_ , not a shopping simulator."

 

"Agreed," Damen said again, looking so excited that he was nearly bouncing in his seat.

 

They shook.

____

Both videos, along with a video giving all of the pertinent details that their little thirty second speech didn't cover, were released at the same time, two weeks after they left the convention early for fear of what might happen if they attended the last panel together.

 

They were an instant success.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charrrrls :)

You know that dedicated group of fans who've spent hours and hours piecing together the truth about Laurent and Damen's relationship, who absolutely have actual physical _binders_ of information that they've printed out and highlighted and used a whole rainbow of color-coded sticky notes to track various dates and times and public conversations?

That group is, of course, spearheaded by Charls I thought that that went without saying, but then I realized that possibly not everyone has caught on that in any Captive Prince AU Charls is _required_ to be the biggest fucking Lamen fanboy ever. He's probably a BNF, to the point where anyone in that section of the YouTube fandom probably has at least heard of him, and most of them has read his extensive meta on everything tangentially to do with Laurent and Damen under the _sun_.

He probably gets to meet them a couple times, and they probably have heard about him online just from looking at their own tumblr tags, and they don't really _mind_ that someone is chronicling their relationship.

At one point Laurent is definitely trying to stay anonymous in a place, and someone comes up to him because someone always comes up to you when you're trying to stay anonymous, and asks his name, and he's like I'M CHARLS. YUP. MY NAME IS CHARLS. 100% K THNX BYEEE and the fan is like wait _you're_  Charls? Because _the_  Charls is right back there doing an impromptu meet-up with a couple of _his_  fans and Laurent is like shit I fucked up I fucked up and Charls looks up to see what's taking this fan who said she had something she wanted him to sign and would be back in two seconds and meets Laurent's eyes and he _knows_ , okay, he's spent _years_  staring at those eyes in an _entirely_ scientific analytical way, there is _no one else_ who those eyes could belong to, and Laurent knows that he knows and prepares himself to have to sprint out of the venue clinging desperately to the tattered shreds of his dignity, and then Charls says CHARLS!!!!! LOOK EVERYBODY IT'S MY COUSIN CHARLS. WE ARE BOTH NAMED AFTER OUR GRANDFATHER, CHARLS. NOW, CHARLS, SHOULDN'T YOU BE GETTING BACK TO THE HOTEL ROOM, and after that Laurent considers Charls a very useful asset.

Damen helpfully translates that to "friend" for Charls at one point, and Charls draws himself up with righteous indignation and announces that being an _asset_  to _PrinceVere_ is _more_  than enough for him. 

Charls probably receives a ticket and a reserved seat right at the front of the panel where Laurent and Damen end up dropping a massive fucking bomb on everyone, and he goes with trepidation because this is the first time Laurent and Damen have ever shown him even the slightest bit of favoritism over their other fans, apart from thanking him personally for the save nearly six months earlier, and he's _suspicious_ , okay, he _knows_  something's gonna go down, so the instant that the words "husband" cross Laurent's lips Charls is fuckin _gone_ He _books_  it out of the convention room and thanks every god he knows and also Laurent and Damen for reserving him a seat on the far side of the room, right next to the door. And then he goes on tumblr and says I WAS RIGHT and then leaves social media entirely for twenty four hours to avoid the massive fallout. It's a good day to be Charls.

**Author's Note:**

> How'd you like it? Follow us on tumblr at interruptedfern.tumblr.com


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